Author . 



^^.*o^ 




* h^^l^ 



^^**s^ 






Title 



Imprint. 



16-Ht7372-2 GPO 






IpmEillllNCY 







By 

Rac>mvoncI 
Patterson 





i 



TAFT'S 



Training for 



the Presidency 




By 
RAYMOND PATTERSON 



1908 
THE CHAPPLE PRESS, BOSTON 



1^ 



. Y^'^ 




/ 



.!ii*> 



TAFT'S TRAINING FOR 
THE PRESIDENCY 




lONAPARTE'S inevitable ques- 
tion, "What has he done?" 
which was propounded when- 
ever any man was proposed 
to him for high mihtary com- 
mand or responsible civil 
office, was based upon the 
soundest of common sense. When 
a board of directors seeks a general 
manager of a railroad, or when a 
housekeeper is looking for a cook, the 
first thing to be done is to determine 
what the applicant has done as an indica- 
tion of what he can do. The most natural 
thing in the world is to test a man's future 
career by his past performances. A recom- 
mendation from a previous employer, a 
record of good work, a demonstration of 
executive capacity, are the things which 



involving millions of dollars would entrust 
it to the young graduate from the law school, 
however intelligent he might be. No board 
of directors would entrust the property of 
their railroad and the Hves of its patrons to 
a general manager who had had no more 
experience than that gained as rear brakeman 
on a suburban train. 



It seems almost idle to express the opinion 
that training is necessary to success in any 
walk of life which requires unusual executive 
capacity, and yet our political history is full 
of the blunders of inefficient public men for 
which the people were responsible and of 
which they were, unfortunately, also the 
victims. It does not at all follow, because a 
man can turn a clever sentence or sway the 
passions of a multitude, or look well at the 
head of a procession, that he is necessarily 
fitted to be mayor of a great city or governor 
of an important state. The people have a 
right to expect that the men who come before 
them for important pubUc offices shall be 



able to demonstrate by their record that 
they are likely to succeed with the trust im- 
posed upon them. The modern theory of 
civil service all tends to the idea that men 
should be tried in small things, promoted to 
greater ones, and finally elevated to com- 
mand only by demonstration of honesty, 
ability, and peculiar capacity. 

The presidency of the United States un- X 
der modern conditions is not merely the 
greatest honor, but the greatest responsi- 
bility that can come to a living man. The 
successful performance of the duties of that 
office involves not alone devotion to the 
interests of the people and unquestioned in- 
tegrity, for these qualities almost all of our 
Presidents have had. There is an absolute 
necessity for something greater and rarer than 
these common virtues. There must be gen- 
ius for executive work, physical capacity 
for the endurance of severe official strain, 
patience and tact in dealing with other men, 
which comes only from the constant buffet- 
ing of official life, and a certain predisposition 
for the management of public affairs which 



may, for want of a better term, be called the 
official temperament. If the people would 
be well served, they must of necessity select 
for the commander in chief of the Army and 
Navy and for the head of the civil govern- 
ment, some one who has the capacity for 
executive work at the outset, and whose 
whole education and training has fitted him 
for the duties he may be called upon to per- 
form. 

There is not a king or an emperor, no 
man in civil or military life, who wields such 
great individual power, who has such a per- 
sonal capacity for good or evil, as the Presi- 
dent of the United States. Under our sys- 
tem of government, in spite of the fact that 
Congress makes all the laws and the courts 
interpret them, and although the President 
can proceed only along lines carefully laid 
down for him in the statute books, he is, 
after all, practically omnipotent in the exer- 
cise of real power. He defines policies for 
the government, both domestic and foreign. 
He can save his country from war by sacri- 
ficing its honor, or he can precipitate his 



people into a bloody conflict to satisfy his 
own ambition or because of an exaggerated 
incapacity to adjust a trivial quarrel. There 
are Presidents and Presidents. One may 
be a harmless nonentity, while his successor 
is quite likely to prove a menace to the 
peace and prosperity of the country. Both 
were honest, but both were deficient in 
training for their high ofiice. 



It will not do to select a President, who 
holds in the hollow of his hand the destinies 
of eighty millions of people and whose great 
power may be wielded for the good or the ill 
of other nations, merely because he has been 
successful in some one line of work. The 
good general, the popular preacher, and even 
the successful governor of a state, are all 
likely to be deficient in the peculiar experi- 
ence which goes to fit a man for the highest 
national employment. The presidency is no 
place for a specialist. It needs rather the 
broadest training, the widest experience, the 
most general education, and the surest grasp 



of the complex machinery which the Ameri- 
can system of government has developed. 
Granting that all the persons now considered 
for the presidency have equal integrity, 
equal natural intelligence, and equal devo- 
tion to the interests of the people, it is a 
proper inquiry to determine whether any 
one of them is superior to the others in the 
peculiar training which is likely to fit a man 
for the tremendous responsibility devolving 
upon a President of the United States in the 
opening decade of the twentieth century, 
after more than a hundred years of successful 
national life under a republican form of 
government. 

Applying Bonaparte's test question, 
"What has he done?" for the purpose of de- 
termining who would make the best suc- 
cessor to Theodore Roosevelt, one naturally 
thinks of William Howard Taft, if for no 
other reason, because his public career has 
been such as to give him, in all probability 
more experience as to the different lines of 
presidential work than any other American 
citizen of the present generation. By this 



is meant merely that his public career has 
been such as to call for the exercise of per- 
sonal supervision in an executive capacity 
over a wider range of governmental respon- 
sibility than any of the other persons men- 
tioned for the presidency in any of the parties 
has been called upon to assume. The test 
will be, therefore, not so much as to Mr. Taft's 
experience, but as to whether he has "made 
good" at all times. That his pubHc ex- 
perience has been diversified to an extra- 
ordinary degree is scarcely a matter of 
argument. It is fair, and the people have a 
right to insist, that each of his official acts, 
every public responsibility he has assumed, 
every policy he has stood for, and every- 
thing he has done from his boyhood to the 
present day in his professional and official 
life, shall be subjected to the closest possible 
scrutiny, to determine whether he is fitted 
for the presidency or not. It happens that 
Secretary Taft has had a peculiar range of 
official life, so that, if he stands the test of 
what he has done in each case, if he can ex- 
hibit a record of executive capacity in half a 



dozen different directions, extending over 
a long period of years, and if he can demon- 
strate the adaptability required in sudden 
transitions from domestic to foreign affairs, 
from the military to civil life, and from 
economics to abstract government, the people 
are likely to assume that he is the person best 
fitted for the presidency and, accordingly, to 
choose him for that high oflSce. 



It does not always do to go into the early 
life of a public man. Many a general, who 
was a success on the battlefield, was at the 
tail of his class in the military academy. 
Many a public man, full of years and of hon- 
ors, gave no indication in his childhood of his 
success in life. Some of the greatest geniuses 
in their manhood were known as dolts in 
their college days. In the case of Mr. Taft 
the record is all the other way. Whether 
there be anything in ancestry or not, he comes 
of a family which left its impress on several 
communities before he saw the light of day. 
His grandfather and his father sat on the 

10 



Bench before he became a judge himself. 
His father was a cabinet officer, a diplomatist, 
and a public man with a wide reputation. 
The younger Taft was brought up in an 
atmosphere which tended to make him ahve 
to questions of great public poHcy. Alphonso 
Taft was Secretary of War and then At- 
torney-General under Grant, while his son 
was still a student at Yale. The effect of 
this family environment is extremely import- 
ant in determining the point of view of a 
young man who was subsequently to reach 
honors greater even than those which had 
come to his distinguished father. 

To Alphonso Taft unquestionably belongs 
a great deal of the credit for the training in 
public affairs which was given to William 
Howard Taft. The old Judge, before he 
went into Grant's cabinet, was a man who 
made himself extremely active in the public 
life of Cincinnati. He was no legal fossil, 
no mere preacher of the abstract duties of a 
citizen. He met public issues and grappled 
with them, and the family life was such as 
to make every one of the boys acquainted 



11 



with these issues. It was Alphonso Taft 
who, as a judge, decided the question as to 
the use of the Bible in the pubHc schools of 
Cincinnati; and it was this same Alphonso 
Taft who was constantly interested in the 
development of the commercial Ufe of the 
city, serving with equal success as a school 
trustee and as a railroad director. 

There was an element of sternness in the 
elder Taft which held the boy close to the 
performance of every duty presented to 
him, and this habit of apphcation to the 
work at hand which was enforced during his 
boyhood days, is responsible for the present 
capacity for work which is the dominant 
feature of the official life of the second one 
of the family to be at the head of the War 
Department. Immense of frame, with a 
passionate fondness for outdoor life, a natural 
athlete, young Taft was nevertheless com- 
pelled from his earliest days to apply him- 
self to his studies in the most exacting way. 
When he went to Yale, he first created the 
idolatry which followed him through the 
university, because he was the best man in 

12 



his class from a purely physical standpoint. 
It was the rigid discipline of the old Judge 
which kept "Bill" Taft off of the ball nine, 
the football team and the crew during all of 
his earlier college Ufe. Best fitted of his 
class for any athletic exhibition, he was barred 
out of all such honors by the strict command 
of his father, and the result was that one of 
the greatest athletes and one of the strongest 
men ever known in the history of Yale was 
also one of the best scholars. 



Endowed by nature with great strength 
and extraordinary capacity for physical en- 
durance, and pushed to the limit of studious 
appUcation by a stern but wise father, William 
Howard Taft was forced to become the best 
possible exemplification of the old Yale ideal 
of the sound mind in the sound body. This 
is important as bearing upon the claim of 
this man upon the presidency. The habit 
of studious application, the physical en- 
durance, and the ability to blend the two 
things, have followed the career of this man 

13 



from his college days up to the present time. 
It is a combination rarely seen in public 
life. The biggest and the cleverest men are 
frequently irritable, dyspeptic and pessi- 
mistic. They are apt to see the hole instead 
of the doughnut, and the greatest orators 
have generally been the least incUned to 
prolonged physical exertion. Many a public 
man has trained himself to endure a period 
of incessant campaigning which would break 
down a prize-fighter, and yet he finds 
himself unable to endure the severe strain 
of continuous executive work. Many a man 
with abundant physical capacity is deficient 
in the power of application and the studious 
habits which are absolutely indispensable to 
a real mastery of public affairs. It is the 
combination of the two, the physical capacity 
to endure and the mental furniture to digest, 
which makes this man Taft so singularly 
fitted for the gravest and most engrossing 
political duties. 

Whether the child is actually father of 
the man or not, it is easy to see that in the 
formative years of a college life, especiallv in 

14 



the case of a serious youngster, who has no 
wild oats to sow and no dark patches to 
hide, one may be able to trace the first steps 
in the growth toward the full stature of one 
of the really great men of the times. In 
the first place, no idler can secure the coveted 
honor of the salutatory in a Yale class. It' 
means that he graduates second in rank 
among several hundred active young men, 
a great majority of whom are striving for 
every possible honor that can come to them. 
Such attainment is not reached except by 
hard grinding work, continued far into the 
night and persisted in when the boy would 
surely prefer to be with his fellows on the 
athletic field or engaged in wild celebrations 
upon the college campus. The mere fact 
that a man graduates from a great university 
with the highest honors, is sufficient demon- 
stration of his intellectual capacity. 



It is a popular notion that the successful 
student is pale, hollow-eyed, anemic and the 
very antithesis of the ideal athlete. It^is 

15 



too often the case that much burning of the 
midnight oil builds up the brain at the ex- 
pense of the rest of the body, but this cer- 
tainly was not true of Taft. In the years he 
spent at Yale, from 1874 to 1878, there never 
was a time when his classmates could not 
point to him as their strongest man on the 
athletic field and about the most studious 
in the class room. There were others all 
about him, who were probably more brilliant, 
who learned more easily, who were more 
showy in their intellectual successes. Taft 
had to dig out a great deal of what he got by 
the hardest kind of hard work, but when he 
learned a thing, he had learned it for good 
and all. He was minutely painstaking in 
his studies, and there is scarcely any doubt 
that the habits he formed in his college days 
and nights have been the foundation stone 
of his success in life. It was no accident 
which enabled him to solve the mysterious 
problem of the Philippines, and he did not 
arrive at a comprehension of the engineering 
difficulties of the Panama Canal by any 
intellectual inspiration. He studied the prob- 

16 



lem set before him as he did his Euclid, and 
the results he achieved were honestly earned 
in every case by his own painstaking and 
minute investigation. 

A man may smile and smile and be a 
villain still, so that it is hardly an argument 
for the elevation of this man to the presidency 
that he has laughed his way through life, and 
that he sees the heavenly humorous side of 
everything. At the same time one can readily 
understand that personal popularity, tact, 
courtesy and similar social qualities are ab- 
solutely indispensable to success in any great 
oflSce. No general can inspire enthusiasm 
in his troops merely by disciphne. No orator 
can sway a great multitude by mere logic. 
There is always the element of enthusiasm, 
of love, of personal devotion, which must be 
mixed with respect to secure results. It is 
therefore fair in this study of Taft and his 
qualifications for the presidency, to go back 
again to those college days merely long enough 
to say that in his class and in his time in the 
university he enjoyed that extraordinary 
popularity which college boys give to some 

17 



one of their idols, whether he be a fellow 
student or an instructor. This boy Taft, as 
he united the sound mind with the sound 
body, was immensely popular and at the same 
time was thoroughly respected by every one 
of the boys who lived close to him, and from 
that day to this probably understand him 
best. His capacity as a mixer, as one of 
those men to whom his fellows go when they 
are in distress, as a warm friend to his inti- 
mates and a "good fellow" to his casual ac- 
quaintances, has only been enlarged from 
year to year. Personal magnetism, infectious 
good humor, and a laugh which, although 
famous, is never forced, are not bad equip- 
ments for a public man who is called upon to 
meet all sorts and conditions of men day in 
and day out, and who has often to temper a 
refusal with a smile and possibly to assume 
a sternness he does not feel. 



Secretary Taft's young manhood was a 
series of preparatory steps in the direction 
of an active career. He studied law, went 

18 



into society, was a reporter on a Cincinnati 
newspaper, and then became assistant prose- 
cuting attorney. Up to that time, as the 
Secretary himself has confided to his friends, 
his knowledge of the law was purely theoret- 
ical. He was put into a position where he 
was forced to prepare cases with extreme 
rapidity, and in this subordinate position he 
learned his law as a practical science and not 
as an abstract one. He became collector of 
internal revenue in 1882 as an accident, 
having gone to Washington to consult the 
president regarding an intended diplomatic 
position for his father. The office was entirely 
outside of the line of his life's work and it is 
to his credit that he resigned it after ten 
months of faithful work, which, however, gave 
him a good insight into the mechanism of 
the federal government from a revenue stand- 
point. It was in 1885, when Mr. Taft was 
only twenty-eight years old, that he became 
assistant county solicitor, and his sole purpose 
in taking that office was to assist in a reform 
movement which, as people in Cincinnati 
know, was entirely successful. Young Taft 

19 



^ 



and the men associated with him succeeded 
after a long fight in breaking up the practice 
of corrupting juries and in driving out of 
town the principal offenders. It was a bat- 
tle fought outright for the people and for the 
purification of the courts. It was a practical 
initiation behind the scenes of municipal 
politics, and one can readily read from the 
history of that time the high ideal of political 
morality which has actuated Secretary Taft 
during all of his public life, and which but 
a few years ago impelled him to resign a seat 
on the Supreme Bench of the United States, 
for which he had longed during all his pro- 
fessional career, merely because he felt he 
had not finished the work he undertook for 
a few million of little brown men on the other 
side of the globe. 

As Judge of the Superior Court of Ohio, 
and as Solicitor-General of the United States, 
Mr. Taft for five years or so was chiefly en- 
gaged in building up a professional reputation 
which would be an enviable possession to any 
man, if there were nothing else to add to it. 
These were the days when the work of the 

20 



lawyer was the main thing in his career. He 
was interested in national affairs by inher- 
itance and by early training, and yet he 
neither sought nor cared for an elective 
office, but had centered his ambition on the 
prizes of his own profession, one of which 
came to him when he was appointed United 
States Judge for the circuit which embraced 
Ohio. 



Much too often a judge on the bench 
like a professor in a college, is forced to dea 
with theories and with facts presented by 
evidence, so that he lacks experience of busi- 
ness affairs in actual contact. This might 
have been the case with Judge Taft at this 
period of his career, had it not been for a pe- 
culiar combination of circumstances. The 
first development of his extraordinary execu- 
tive capacity came while he was a judge on 
the bench and not while he was Governor of 
the Philippines, as many people suppose. 
From 1892 until almost the close of the cen- 
tury, there was a period of intense financial 

21 



depression, followed by a slow recovery. There 
had been an over-expansion of northern 
capital in the border and southern states. 
All sorts of manufacturing, railroad and 
mining enterprises in the South had been 
clamoring for development, and the North 
was called upon to supply the money. Some 
of these investments were spread out too 
thin, and when the financial crisis came, 
one company after another went to the wall. 
The sixth judicial circuit in which Judge 
Taft was located covered the states of Michi- 
gan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. His 
court was inundated with receivership cases 
and complex litigation involving all sorts of 
indusstrial enterprises. Judge Taft soon found 
himself in the position of a managing partner 
or acting director for manufacturing plants, 
iron mines, railroads, and a dozen other 
growing concerns. To knowledge of the law 
it was indispensable that he should add 
business capacity. It was in this way that 
he developed executive ability, and he learned 
the secret of large affairs while administering 
the estates of great corporations which had 

22 



been forced to become wards of the court as 
a result of financial difficulties. 

It was a good school and the Judge was 
an apt scholar at this, as at every other study. 
He was forced to become acquainted with 
financial management on a large scale, and in 
his efforts to restore the property and save 
it for its owners it became necessary that he 
should learn the details of the business. 
Multifarious interests were at stake, receivers 
were constantly reporting to the "court on a 
variety of industrial issues, labor unions 
sought the protection of the judiciary and 
the court became an industrial and com- 
mercial clearing house, the Judge being called 
upon to exercise something vastly greater 
than mere judicial functions. It was the 
location of the court, embracing states both 
north and south of the boundary line be- 
tween the two sections, and the peculiarity 
of the time of great commercial depression, 
which combined to bring out the executive 
capacity of Judge Taft and to prevent his 
becoming a mere bundle of law and a dealer 
in profound abstractions. Beyond all doubt, 

23 



it was this period in his career which de- 
veloped his capacity for pubhc affairs; and so 
it was that, when he was translated from the 
bench to the unfamiliar ground of the Phihp- 
pine Islands, he took hold of the work with 
the same confidence with which he would 
have undertaken the organization of another 
iron mill in Tennessee or a bankrupt stock 
farm in the blue grass region of Kentucky, 



It was a daring thing to do — to translate a 
federal judge from the peaceful atmosphere 
of his court in the Ohio valley to the unfamiliar 
antipodes of an island empire, unexpectedly 
acquired by the United States, and the future 
of which no man could estimate. The clever- 
est man might have been pardoned for mak- 
ing a failure of such a work, because it in- 
volved not only a transition from one side 
of the world to the other, not only a sudden 
jump from the law to executive work, but 
the man who undertook this labor knew, and 
those who selected him knew, that he must 
hew a new path for himself and must under- 

24 



take a work for which the very framework f 
of the American repubhc was absolutely 
unfitted. Time has shown that William 
McKinley, Mark Hanna and Elihu Root, who 
were the three men chiefly responsible for the 
choice, made no mistake when they selected 
Judge Taft, and yet they must have been 
fearful, and he must have been afraid, of the 
results. When in 1900 Judge Taft resigned 
his comfortable place on the federal bench, 
which was good during life under ordinary 
conditions, and put behind him the possibility 
of promotion to the Supreme Court, which 
had been his legitimate ideal, he had not the 
slightest assurance that the Philippines would 
offer him any permanent field of activity; 
and he was certainly unaware of the prob- 
ability that he would emerge from a tour of 
duty in the islands as one of the marked men 
of America. Called to an unfamiliar duty, 
asked to resign a pleasant position from 
which he could not be ejected, he chose an 
unpromising line of duty because he believed 
he was not justified in refusing his services 3* 
when the President and Secretary of State 

25 



demanded in so many words that he give his 
time to the country without regard to his 
own personal fortune. 



The situation in the Phihppines was a 
perilous one when Judge Taft was appointed 
President of the Commission which had been 
constituted to establish a semblance of civil 
government in the islands. When Dewey 
sailed into Manila Bay, no one had the slight- 
est idea that the war would in any way entail 
upon this country the burden of the manage- 
ment of a vast colony across the Pacific. The 
war was undertaken for the regeneration of 
Cuba, and for that alone. The great ma- 
jority of our people had to take down their 
atlases to find out where the Philippines 
were, when the cables first announced briefly 
that Dewey had smashed up the Spanish 
fleet in Manila Bay. Even after that splendid 
victory, few people took time to realize that 
we had inadvertently saddled ourselves with 
a responsibility quite similar to that of Great 
Britain and India. Up to the time of the 

26 



signing of the treaty of peace, people were 
uncertain what was to be done with the 
Philippines. 



After they came thoroughly into our 
possession there was no time to formulate 
theories of government for the islands, be- 
cause Aguinaldo and his fanatical followers 
were putting up a fair-sized revolution which 
could be met only by overwhelming military 
force. The first year or two of our occupancy 
was necessarily a period of military opera- 
tions. Cuba, which had been the bone of 
contention between Spain and the United 
States, was at peace from the day of the ces- 
sation of hostilities, but the Philippines, which 
no one had thought of when the war began, 
still continued to furnish the field for bloody 
hostilities and an almost savage warfare. 
Aguinaldo was harassed through and over 
and around the lakes, the rivers, the swamps 
and the mountains of Luzon, while expedi- 
tionary forces were dispatched to less known 
islands of the group where savages with un- 

27 



familiar names were carrying on intermittent 
hostilities. 

It was at this trying period that Judge 
Taft was asked to leave Ohio and go to the 
Philippines to establish there the beginning 
of civil government. It was a task from 
which any man might shrink and the success- 
ful accomplishment of it is the principal 
argument of the former governor-general 
that he is competent to assume the greatest 
civic responsibility. Our government was 
not organized with a view to territorial ex- 
pansion beyond either of the oceans. The 
theory of our national life was that we would 
avoid entangling alliances with foreign na- 
tions. We do business under a written 
constitution and all powers not specifically 
granted to the federal government are re- 
served to the states. When Taft went to the 
Philippines no man knew whether they were 
worth keeping or not, and certainly no one 
understood either the power or the limitations 
of the federal government as applied to island 
possessions on the other side of an ocean from 
the home government. 

28 



For about three years they were governed 
by the President as commander in chief of 
the Army and Navy, and even when Congress 
passed the organic act of 1902, it merely 
confirmed the half-military and half-civil 
government created by President McKinley 
and it even made his instructions to the 
Secretary of War part of the statutory bill 
of rights of the islands. When Judge Taft 
became President of the Philippine Commis- 
sion, and for a year after his appointment as 
Civil Governor of the Islands in July, 1901, 
there was an intermittent state of war be- 
tween the federal troops and what was left 
of the insurrectionary forces. It was far 
from being an auspicious time for the estab- 
lishment of a successful insular government. 
Army men insisted that the insurrectionary 
party would misunderstand any attempt to 
set up a civil government. There was a 
strong minority party in the United States 
which expressed sympathy with the insurrec- 
tion, and which demanded in party platforms 
and on the stump that the Filipinos should 
be given immediate independence. The pre- 

29 



vious government of the Islands had been a 
strange mixture of rehgious and temporal 
power, and the whole fabric was tinged with 
official despotism and dishonor. There was 
in this country at that time no colonial ma- 
chinery whatsoever, and no trained body of 
administrators and civil officers. The very 
language of the Islands was foreign to us, 
and intensely foreign at that. Everything 
conspired to make the task of setting up 
civil government there novel and hazardous, 
with the chances all in favor of repeated 
failures before ultimate success could be 
reached. It was necessary to keep a large 
army in condition for immediate service and 
there was no assurance that a change of 
administration in the United States might not 
upset every plan and every assurance and 
every hope of Governor-General Taft, and 
those who were working with him to elevate 
the Filipinos to a position where they might 
at some time in the future become self- 
governing. 

* * * 

^ The Philippine chapter in the career of 

30 



William Howard Taft is merely a repetition of 
that painstaking, earnest genius which made 
him an honor man at his college, and which 
now after the lapse of years has set his feet 
close to the threshold of the White House. 
Great things have been accomplished in the 
Philippines and it is not too much to say, in 
spite of the hearty co-operation of Presidents 
McKinley and Roosevelt, and in spite of 
the wise counsel of Elihu Root, when he was 
Secretary of War, that to Governor Taft and 
then to Secretary Taft the chief credit is due, 
and certain it is that no man in the present 
administration has ever sought to withhold 
the full measure of that credit from him. 

It would require a volume to tell in detail 
what has been done in the Philippines, but 
as a measure of executive capacity and as a 
demonstration of his fitness for the presidency. 
Secretary Taft needs only to have the people 
understand in a general way just what he 
did and is still doing to regenerate and uplift 
an alien people who in such a strange way 
have become the wards of this Yankee gov- 
ernment of ours. 

31 



In the first place it is worth while noting 
that the islands are in a state of absolute 
tranquility. That has been accomplished 
largely, if not entirely, by the personal in- 
fluence of the Governor-General. The Fili- 
pinos learned to know that he was honest 
and that he was devoted to their interest. 
He did not promise them independence today 
or tomorrow or the day after. He neither 
cajoled nor bullied nor cringed. With in- 
finite tact and with a positive genius for lead- 
ership, Governer Taft convinced these strange 
people, speaking another language, that he 

yi at least would do the best thing in his power 
for their material, mental, and spiritual com- 
fort. A system of education has been built 

"^ up and half a million children are now being 
taught to read and write English. The 

>' foundation has been laid firmly and securely 
for a primary and industrial educational 
system which is likely to be the most lasting 
benefit conferred on the islands by the Ameri- 
can government. Sanitation for the people 
and government supervision to preserve the 
health of their flocks and herds have both 

32 



/I 



been successfully introduced. A judicial sys-^ 
tern has been established which has been fa 
revelation to the people there, who were 
accustomed only to the cumbrous and cor- 
rupt methods of the Spanish courts. Public^t 
improvements have been undertaken, roads 
built, docks constructed, streets improved, 
a complete system of posts, telephones and 
telegraphs established, and railroads built, J, 
which in five years will furnish a system of 
1,000 miles in extent. A civil system has A 
been inaugurated which has divided the pub- 
lic work between the Americans and the 
Filipinos with a constantly increased repre- 
sentation of the natives. Public lands have / 
been opened for settlement, semi-official banks 
have been established, and the financial 
status of the Philippine government today 
is practically beyond criticism. 



These are accomplished facts, not theories 
or promises to pay. It is a record of things 
done, a story of accomplishment which tells 
its own tale as to the masterful executive 

33 



genius of the man who is chiefly responsible 
for these splendid results. 

If the Philippines furnished a field for the 
development of a capacity for creating civil 
government, the Isthmus of Panama de- 
veloped another angle of the many-sided 
executive life of William Howard Taft. He 
had scarcely been appointed Secretary of 
War before President Roosevelt issued an 
executive order placing the work of the 
^ Isthmian canal commission under his im- 
' mediate supervision, "both in the construc- 
tion of the canal and the exercise of such 
governmental powers as it seems necessary 
for the United States to exercise under the 
treaty with the republic of Panama in the 
canal strip." 

Interoceanic canals are not dug every- 
day. The work is one which involves, in the 
^ case of Panama, the most delicate civil func- 
tions harmoniously blended with the pro- 
fessional discipline exercised by the engineer 
officers of the army. The canal is the largest 
single public work ever undertaken by the 
United States, and will continue to furnish 

34 



problems in the next administration and for 
years thereafter. It is part of the Presidential 
capital of Secretary Taft that he has been 
with the canal from the start, and that he has 
been forced to study the engineering prob- 
lems it presents at first hand. One engineer 
after another abandoned the work, but the 
Secretary was always steadfast, never dis- 
couraged, and never ready to abandon the 
effort necessary to secure success. The story 
of his trips to and from the Isthmus, of the 
confusion which had to be adjusted, of the 
jealousies and rivalries between men which 
needed to be composed, and of the financial 
and civil questions which were brought be- 
fore the Secretary for settlement, is a tale of 
that same hard work which has made Taft 
a success in life. 



In November, 1904, Secretary Taft made 
his first visit to the Isthmus, and a full ac- 
count of what he accomplished at that time, 
forming the first authentic report of actual 
conditions on the Isthmus, was submitted 

35 



to the President in January, 1905. Early 
in the summer, Chief Engineer Wallace ten- 
dered his resignation and the Secretary was 
forced to provide a new head for the work. 
In the following October he was once 
more en route to the Isthmus, and during 
the winter he was almost constantly engaged 
as a witness before the senate committee ex- 
plaining the actual conditions of the work 
and defending the administration from the 
partisan attacks made upon it. In January 
of 1906, Secretary Taft, in a luminous letter 
which was published broadcast throughout 
the world, exposed the folly of hasty criti- 
cisms made by Poultney Bigelow and 
others who had studied only the fringe of 
things on the Isthmus. In the following 
winter another trip was necessary, the Secre- 
tary being accompanied this time by the dis- 
tinguished consulting engineers who were 
asked to report with him upon the nature of 
the location of the Gatun lock and dam sites. 
The result of this personal inspection was a 
professional, scientific demonstration of the 
safety and the satisfactory condition of the 

36 



sites for the great dam, both at Gatun and 
on the Pacific side of the canal. 

While on the Isthmus, Secretary Taft, by 
special direction of the President, found time 
to drop the engineering side and to conduct 
an investigation into various perplexing ques- 
tions regarding the labor supply. On his 
return a full report on this subject was made 
to the President by the hard-working secre- 
tary, and it is significant that the agreement 
drawn up in that report was accepted by all 
of the laborers who were concerned, and all 
danger of serious labor troubles from that 
source was removed at once and for good by 
the wise and temperate decisions of the 
Secretary of War. 



In March, 1907, Chief Engineer Stevens 
also retired from the work and upon Secretary 
Taft was put the great burden of reorganizing 
the whole work on the Panama canal. He 
did this with the greatest success. The canal 
commission was reorganized by the appoint- 
ment of army and navy engineers. This put 

37 



the construction of the canal directly under 
the personal supervision of the United States 
government and relieved the great work from 
the jealousies and interference of private 
persons. 

Since that time, Secretary Taft has found 
time to reconstruct the accounting depart- 
ment, to transfer the adjustment of accounts 
between the railroad company and the com- 
mission to the Isthmus, to institute inquiries 
with a view to establishing a Pacific coast 
line of steamships, to recommend a widen- 
ing of the locks and a change of location 
of some of them, to put into effect a 
system of trial by jury, to limit the employ- 
ment of skilled laborers, clerks and similar 
employes to American citizens, to adjust 
differences with the local Panama oflicers, 
and to do a few other things in addition to 
directing the Chief of Engineers in the actual 
work of digging the canal. A mere inspection 
of the official record in regard to the canal 
will show to how great an extent this one 
man has acquired the capacity for untiring 
work and has achieved probably a better 

38 



training for the Chief Magistracy in its purely 
technical details than any other American 
citizen has ever had. 

Purely domestic government is by no 
means the principal or even the most im- 
portant work of a President. In our relations 
with foreign governments we must necessarily 
depend on the Chief Executive. The Con- 
stitution gives him the power to appoint all 
our diplomatic representatives. He it is 
who must make all our treaties in their first 
instance, and through the Secretary of State 
he conducts all intercourse with foreign 
nations. It is an offense for a diplomatic 
representative of a foreign nation to deal 
direct with the congress or the courts. He 
must proceed through the State Department, 
and the Ambassadors of the great nations 
invariably insist upon conducting their busi- 
ness at first hand with the President himself. 
The result is that our Presidents must be- 
come adepts in international law. It is im- 
possible that the country at large should 
be kept informed day by day as to the prog- 
ress of diplomatic negotiations. Even the 

39 



senate is consulted only when a treaty is 
concluded. It is for the President through 
his Secretary of State and in person to meet 
the demands of foreign governments and to 
maintain both the dignity and honor of the 
United States. A weak man might surrender 
with dishonor, a foolish man might precipi- 
tate the country into a foolish war, and an 
ignorant man might involve us in untold 
difficulties without knowing just what the 
matter was. 



•hl It is fortunate for the country that this 

many-sided man has been put into a position 
where he has been compelled to meet the most 
delicate international questions. That he 
has succeeded in each case is all the more to 
his credit, because after all, diplomacy is 
something entirely foreign to the administra- 
tion of an insular government, the building 
of a huge artificial waterway, or the proper 
conduct of an army system. 

Almost at the beginning of his work in 
the Philippines, the new Governor-General 

40 



was confronted with a situation which re- 
quired for its adjustment the very highest 
grade of diplomatic ability. A large propor- 
tion of the lands in the islands were in the 
undisputed possession of certain religious 
orders, which had a title dating back for 
hundreds of years, and backed up by the 
royal patents of Spain. The conditions in 
the islands were such that the continued 
occupation of these lands by the religious 
orders would surely have provoked continuous 
insurrections. It was absolutely indispen- 
sable that these lands should be withdrawn 
from their religious ownership and distributed 
among the people, it being evident that 
popular ownership in the Philippines as else- 
where would be the surest guarantee of peace. 
The point of view of the religious orders 
and of the people was diametrically opposite. 
Our government had no machinery for deal- 
ing with such a question. It was necessary 
to pacify the people, but the legal titles to 
the lands were undeniably good. In this 
emergency. Secretary Taft was dispatched 
direct to the Pope of Rome. It was an ex- 

41 



traordinary mission. He was called upon to 
negotiate with a religious Prince with whom 
we had and could have no diplomatic re- 
lations. The question at issue was a danger- 
ous one, because it involved the creation of 
relations between church and state which 
are absolutely foreign to our form of govern- 
ment. We had taken the islands from a 
loyal son of the church and we were assum- 
ing to build up a new civilization there in 
which the church was to be divorced once 
and for all from the government. 

This historic conference between the Holy 
Father and the Governor-General of the 
Philippines is almost unique in diplomacy. 
The results obtained by clear understanding 
between these two honest men were almost 
stupendous. It was necessary to eliminate 
the religious orders as agricultural landlords, 
and at the same time this had to be done 
without infringing in any way upon the 
rights of the Roman Catholic Church, whose 
great influence for good in the islands no one 
denied. 'A basis of agreement was found, 
the United States agreed to pay a sum con- 

42 






^^ -^.V 



siderably in excess of what it believed the • 1 
lands were worth,"! but it did so because 
prompt action was necessary to prevent con- 
tinuous revolutions. The visit to the Pope 
and the personal intercession of the Governor- 
General resulted in the Holy Father sending 
an apostolic delegate to the Islands with 
adequate powers, as a result of which the 
lands were turned over to the insular govern- 
ment for $7,000,000, and the Hierarchy agreed 
to send no friars as parish priests in any case 
where the Governor-General makes final ob- 
jection. The acquisition of these lands by 
the government and the adjustment of dif- 
ferences as to the employment of friars as 
parish priests brought peace to the islands, 
and it was done in such a way that the strong- 
est supporter and admirer of the American 
government in the Philippines today is the / 
Church of Rome. 

SfS 5|» •!• ^ 

Another and totally different phase of 
international politics is presented in the case 
of Cuba. Here too, Taft, the man of action, 
was called upon to represent the government 

43 



V 



i 



of the United States in unfamiliar conditions, 
and to create for an alien people a temporary 
government to succeed the unfortunate re- 
public which they had themselves failed ut- 
terly to maintain. The island of Cuba was as 
much under the personal control and direction 
of the former Secretary of War as is the 
Panama canal or the Philippines. His was 
the guiding hand, his is the strong arm, and 
it was his visit to the island which brought 
peace out of chaos and which taught the 
Cuban people to look up to the integrity and 
to the genius of one great American citizen. 
It is extraordinary, of course, that this 
one man of all those who have contributed 
to make the administration of Theodore 
Roosevelt brilliant should always have been 
in such a position as to be called upon for 
peculiar service in emergencies. It may be 
^ fate or it may be accident, but it is certainly 
true that almost every great and unusual 
governmental problem which has been pre- 
sented to the country in the last five or six 
years has in some way invoked the executive 
assistance of Secretary Taft. 

44 



y 



Early in September, 1906, our consul 
general at Havana began to notify the govern- 
ment that the Cuban republic under Presi- 
dent Palma was fast going to pieces. Events 
moved with extraordinary rapidity. The in- 
surgent forces in the vicinity of Havana 
pressed into the suburbs. The Cuban Presi- 
dent, an honest and a gentle citizen, called 
upon to exercise unusual responsibility, was 
unable to protect life and property. He 
asked the United States to send war vessels 
and his request was acceded to. President 
Palma resolved not to continue at, the head 
of an inefficient government, the Vice-Presi- 
dent of Cuba decided not to accept the office, 
the cabinet ministers declared that they 
would resign, and there was imminent a total 
absence of legal power with a certain state 
of anarchy as the result. 



In the middle of September, President 1^ 
Roosevelt, then at Oyster Bay, called upon 
the Secretary of War to go to Havana at once 
to restore order. Mr. Taft responded with 

45 



customary alacrity. Inside of two days, he 
wrote the President that the army was ready 
to meet the call of a possible forcible inter- 
vention, and he had prepared an opinion by 
the Judge Advocate General showing the 
right of the President to intervene under the 
Piatt amendment without additional author- 
ity from Congress. Accompanied by the As- 
sistant Secretary of State, Mr. Taft and his 
party proceeded to Cuba by war-ship from 
Tampa, reaching Havana September 19. The 
Cuban Secretary of State called at once and 
admitted the situation was serious. Then 
followed a series of conferences with President 
Palma, with the opposition, with the repre- 
sentatives of foreign governments and with 
the revolutionary generals whose activity 
had precipitated the fall of the first Cuban 
republic. 

At the time Secretary Taft reached Cuba, 
nearly 10,000 men were ready to march into 
the city of Havana. In anticipation of inter- 
vention, the general staff of the United 
States army had prepared plans for landing 
an expeditionary force of 18,000 men and the 

46 



Secretary carried with him telegraphic orders 
which could be issued within two hours. 
Few, if any, of these troops were needed. The 
mere presence of the Secretary of War of the 
United States was sufficient to put an end 
to the fighting. Ten days after his arrival. 
Secretary Taft, with the approval of th9 ^ 
President, proclaimed himself provisional gov- 
ernor of Cuba, thus adding another page to his 
extraordinary history as a public man. The 
insurgents were rapidly disarmed and a pro- 
visional government was established without 
recourse to military force. It was a triumph 
of tact and of adaptability, the experience of 
the Secretary of War in dealing with Spanish- 
speaking people in the Philippines having 
been utilized to the utmost extent. 

By the following October, or within a 
month after he had landed in the islands. 
Secretary Taft had brought order out of 
chaos, and had solidified public sentiment to 
such an extent that he was enabled to turn 
the government of the islands over to Gov- 
ernor Magoon, who was brought from the 
Isthmus of Panama for that purpose. 

47 



Since that time the administration of 
the Island of Cuba has been largely under 
the direction of the Secretary of War. The 
problem there was the creation of a new 
form of government which would be so stable 
that it could not be readily overturned and 
which would be based on the sure founda- 
tion of abstract democracy. Before long a 
new Cuban republic will rise upon the ashes 
of the one which was destroyed in September, 
1906. It is the last chance for Cuba, and 
President Roosevelt has insisted that Secre- 
tary Taft should give to the Cubans every 
possible opportunity to demonstrate to the 
world their ability for self-government. If 
the habit of creating revolutions continues, 
however, the United States will again be 
called upon to intervene, and in any event, 
Cuba, like the Panama canal, will be a legacy 
from the present to the future administra- 
tion, so that the peculiar training of the 
Secretary of War will be as valuable in one 
case as in the other. 

During a good part of the year 1907, the 
relations between the United States and 

48 



Japan, while not seriously strained, were 
extremely delicate. It was fortunate for the 
country that Secretary Taft happened to be 
on his way to the Philippines in the fall of 
1907, to participate in the inauguration of 
the first popular legislative assembly in the 
islands. The diplomatic story of the rela- 
tions between Japan and the United States 
may not be told for some time to come, be- 
cause all of the results have not been achieved. 
It is the simple truth, however, that the 
fortuitous visit to Japan of Secretary Taft 
in September, 1907, and the interviews he 
held at that time with the Emperor himself, 
the prime minister, the minister of foreign 
affairs, and many other Japanese dignitaries, 
had a great deal to do with the preservation 
of peaceful relations between the two nations, 
and with the production of the more cordial 
understanding of the differences growing out 
of the immigration question. 



The Secretary's cables from Japan to 
Washington at this period, if they are ever 

49 



published, will fully sustain his reputation as 
a diplomatist of the first rank. He received 
personal assurances that Japan neither de- 
sired war with the United States nor was in 
a condition financially to wage one. At the 
same time he discovered that the proposi- 
tion for a mutual exclusion treaty was dis- 
tasteful to the Japanese unless it included 
Europeans as well, and that if this poUcy 
were persisted in by the United States it 
would result in a destruction of friendly re- 
lations to a certain extent. It was Taft who 
conveyed to Minister Hayashi and to the 
Emperor the positive denial of the absurd 
story that the United States was proposing to 
sell the Philippines, and it was to him that 
the Japanese declared that, while they might 
resent the occupation of the islands by any 
European nation, they would always welcome 
American control as at present, or a future 
independent Philippine government under 
the strong protectorate of the United States. 
The visit to the Philippines and the return 
through Russia, thus encircling the globe, 
was a spectacular affair, even for such an 

50 



official globe trotter as the Secretary of War, 
but it may be doubted if any incident of that 
journey, and indeed any incident of his 
whole career, called for the exercise of more 
delicate statecraft than the series of inter- 
views, in the latter part of September, when 
Secretary Taft was sojourning in the Shiba 
Palace as the guest of the Emperor of Japan, 
All the world was watching our great battle- 
ship fleet, then making ready for its trip to 
the Pacific, and an imprudent emissary, or 
a truculent host might between them have 
precipitated a conflict which both nations 
would have regretted ever afterward. 

These are the important features in the 
official life of Secretary Taft, and they are 
the things to which one readily recurs in 
attempting to show how strangely fate has 
seen to it that he should be specially trained 
for the duties of the presidential office. It 
is a great thing to dig a canal or to recon- 
struct a republic, or to fit people for self- 
government, but, after all, these great things 
must be fortified by regular, persistent, and 
successful daily work. 

51 



It so happens that in the mastery of rou- 
tine, in the abihty to handle men in public 
office, in industry, in the intuitive capacity 
for understanding great things at a glance, 
the Secretary of War has best demonstrated 
his fitness for still higher office. As one goes 
up the scale, either in business or in govern- 
mental work, the thing most necessary in an 
executive officer is the ability to get at the 
meat of a subject in the shortest possible 
time, and, by avoiding unnecessary details, to 
concentrate the attention on the important 
features. This is executive capacity in a 
nutshell. Many good men have never been 
able to learn it, and some people who have 
learned it are not good men. It is the com- 
bination of unquestioned integrity with proved 
executive ability which makes Secretary Taft 
specially fitted for the only office within the 
American republic which involves greater 
responsibilities and greater demands upon 
the individual than that which Mr. Taft held 
until nominated for the presidency. 

To be successful as a president, a man 
must necessarily have not only a great power 

52 



of initiative, unwearying tact, a vast fund 
of patience, the ability to "size up" men 
correctly, and that faculty of leadership 
which attracts other men to the standard 
and infuses into them the necessary enthusi- 
asm, but he must possess to a high degree 
that subtle characteristic we call executive 
ability, which is nothing more nor less than 
a capacity for the neglect of little things, 
and the rapid seizure upon the essential of 
any great question. 

It is in this regard more than in anything 
else that Secretary Taft has succeeded. His 
purely departmental training has been su- 
perb. When not inspecting a canal or preach- 
ing patience to fiery Spaniards, he has been 
consulting with gray-haired colonels over the 
management of the army, discussing the 
fortification of seaport towns, examining pro- 
jects for the improvement of rivers and har- 
bors, considering the question of the water 
supply at Niagara Falls, arranging for tests 
of dirigible balloons, studying the estimates 
of army expenditures to see where they can 
be profitably pruned, and a dozen other 

53 



avenues of activity, learning every minute 
the great trade of government. 



It would perhaps be unfair to both men 
to contrast a man of affairs like Taft with a 
doctrinaire like Bryan, and yet such com- 
parisons are inevitable. One does not choose 
a preacher to run a locomotive, nor would 
one expect a railway fireman to preach a good 
sermon. We send our future lawyers and 
doctors to professional schools, the trades 
union prescribes the qualifications for an 
apprentice boy, and the whole tendency of 
our twentieth-century life is in the direction 
of special education for particular effort. 
The American people have just as much 
right to demand that their President shall 
have satisfactory previous experience as they 
have to insist that the humble clerk in the 
government department shall pass a success- 
ful service examination. 

This sketch is not intended as a panegyric 
upon the Secretary of War. It is merely an 
attempt to show in a plain, logical, matter-of- 

54 



fact sort of way that the course of events 
during the last ten years has put William 
Howard Taft in a position where he had to 
learn the science of government or become 
a public failure. That he has not failed in 
any one of the manifold responsibilities which 
have been put upon him, all the world knows. 
It follows that upon him, more than upon 
any other one man in this country, the people 
can more safely place the responsibility as 
well as the honor of the Chief Magistracy of 
the republic. 




55 



